Manuscripta mediaevalia Gottwicensia. Benedictine monks and their books

The project will focus on the manuscript tradition of Stift Göttweig, which was founded by bishop Altmann of Passau in 1083 as a convent of regular canons, but in 1094 converted into a Benedictine community following the reform ideas of Cluny. In a new methodological approach recording and cataloguing, digitization of selected manuscripts and scientific analysis and interpretation will be combined. The study of the manuscript collection still existing in situ will be complemented by a search for manuscripts of Göttweig provenance in other libraries, leading to a reconstruction of the medieval library. On this basis and by taking into account existing medieval book lists the medieval library history of Göttweig up to the beginning of the 15th century will be studied using evidence-based methods. Analysis and interpretation of the results will answer questions of institutional history, history of religious orders and cultural history. Text tradition and writing activities will be taken into view as well as manuscript exchange, cross references between different codices and binding fragments as remnants and witnesses of formerly existing complete manuscripts. The result of the preliminary work of manuscript recording and the digital copies of selected manuscripts will be incorporated in the Austrian manuscript database manuscripta.at maintained by the project`s-research institution and will thus be accessible to scholars for further research without delay. Analysis and interpretation of the manuscript collection will be published in a monographic study.

The main focus of the project was a study on the history of the library of the Benedictine monastery of Göttweig based on the exploration of its medieval manuscript collection. The material covered ranged from the time of its foundation in 1083 by bishop Altmann of Passau up to 1400. In the course of the project 245 manuscripts from the 9th to the 14th century have been described according to scientific standards. Included in these 245 were 27 manuscripts which are held today in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, two are today part of the collection of the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome and another one is held today in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, all of which could be described in autopsy. The analysis of the data in situ was complemented by research of dislocated and dispersed codices of Göttweig provenance which until lately where unknown but could now be identified in manuscript collections of libraries in the United States. Due to detailed palaeographical and codicological analysis and research on location and personalities the project was able to reconstruct stock, accession and losses of the historic collection. Next to this historic inventories, correspondence and other archive material have been included in the survey. This source- based approach resulted in a partial reconstruction the medieval library around 1400. The project results are published online in open access and in print: the manuscript descriptions and digitized facsimiles are available on manuscripta.at, a manuscript portal hosted by the Division of Codicology and Palaeography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Moreover, project results have been presented on national and international workshops and conferences as well as published in a range of articles. An overall analysis of the data will be published in a forthcoming monograph.